I once sent what I thought was a perfectly reasonable request to the Prototype team: put semicolons and curly braces where they belong. Their response? "We don't wanna." Prototype is absolutely littered with places where removal of a single carriage return (much less regex-based compression) can break your entire application. I was a big fan of Prototype back when I knew nothing about JavaScript, but once I started exploring the other frameworks, I realized that it had taught me some bad habits that I then had to unlearn.
I think Dojo is overly bloated, but at least if you're mimicking their source to write your own code, at a minimum you'll be picking up good syntactical habits, as well as a few other good practices to follow. Ext is even more noticeable in that regard. And their documentation is stellar.
Jeff's dead on: there should have been an abstraction layer to allow any framework to be catered to in the markup Domino renders. And as of 8.5, there will be: the JSF render kit. We'll be able to rewrite the layer where Domino actually turns backend objects into markup. I suspect that'll be a beast of a task, but early next year (if not sooner), I imagine you'll start seeing custom render kits that cater to Ext, YUI, "Protaculous", even Mootools.
My advice is to become intimately familiar with Dojo so that you can take advantage of what will be included out of the box in Domino later this year, but explore what other frameworks (Ext is my favorite) will allow you to do if you continue to "roll your own", whether that be in existing Domino versions or utilizing custom render kits when those are available.
I once sent what I thought was a perfectly reasonable request to the Prototype team: put semicolons and curly braces where they belong. Their response? "We don't wanna." Prototype is absolutely littered with places where removal of a single carriage return (much less regex-based compression) can break your entire application. I was a big fan of Prototype back when I knew nothing about JavaScript, but once I started exploring the other frameworks, I realized that it had taught me some bad habits that I then had to unlearn.
I think Dojo is overly bloated, but at least if you're mimicking their source to write your own code, at a minimum you'll be picking up good syntactical habits, as well as a few other good practices to follow. Ext is even more noticeable in that regard. And their documentation is stellar.
Jeff's dead on: there should have been an abstraction layer to allow any framework to be catered to in the markup Domino renders. And as of 8.5, there will be: the JSF render kit. We'll be able to rewrite the layer where Domino actually turns backend objects into markup. I suspect that'll be a beast of a task, but early next year (if not sooner), I imagine you'll start seeing custom render kits that cater to Ext, YUI, "Protaculous", even Mootools.
My advice is to become intimately familiar with Dojo so that you can take advantage of what will be included out of the box in Domino later this year, but explore what other frameworks (Ext is my favorite) will allow you to do if you continue to "roll your own", whether that be in existing Domino versions or utilizing custom render kits when those are available.